I am not sure wether it had been discussed here in BC, so opened this thread. People love conspiracy, and this is one of the greatest conspiracies-Men's landing on Moon is fake. Read!

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Did man really set foot on the moon?

Shocking : See what NASA has done (Long but worth reading)

Did man really walk on the Moon or was it the ultimate camera trick, asks David Milne?

In the early hours of May 16, 1990, after a week spent watching old video footage of man on the Moon, a thought was turning into an obsession in the mind of Ralph Rene.

"How can the flag be fluttering?" the 47 year old American kept asking himself when there's no wind on the atmosphere free Moon? That moment was to be the beginning of an incredible Space odyssey for the self- taught engineer from New Jersey.

He started investigating the Apollo Moon landings, scouring every NASA film, photo and report with a growing sense of wonder, until finally reaching an awesome conclusion: America had never put a man on the Moon. The giant leap for mankind was fake.

It is of course the conspiracy theory to end all conspiracy theories. But Rene has now put all his findings into a startling book entitled NASA Mooned America. Published by himself, it's being sold by mail order - and is a compelling read.

The story lifts off in 1961 with Russia firing Yuri Gagarin into space, leaving a panicked America trailing in the space race. At an emergency meeting of Congress, President Kennedy proposed the ultimate face saver, put a man on the Moon. With an impassioned speech he secured the plan an unbelievable 40 billion dollars.

And so, says Rene (and a growing number of astro-physicists are beginning to agree with him), the great Moon hoax was born. Between 1969 and 1972, seven Apollo ships headed to the Moon. Six claim to have made it, with the ill fated Apollo 13 - whose oxygen tanks apparently exploded halfway being the only casualties. But with the exception of the known rocks, which could have been easily mocked up in a lab, the photographs and film footage are the only proof that the Eagle ever landed. And Rene believes they're fake.

For a start, he says, the TV footage was hopeless. The world tuned in to watch what looked like two blurred white ghosts throw rocks and dust. Part of the reason for the low quality was that, strangely, NASA provided no direct link up. So networks actually had to film man's greatest achievement from a TV screen in Houston - a deliberate ploy, says Rene, so that nobody could properly examine it.

By contrast, the still photos were stunning. Yet that's just the problem. The astronauts took thousands of pictures, each one perfectly exposed and sharply focused. Not one was badly composed or even blurred.

As Rene points out, that's not all: The cameras had no white meters or view ponders. So the astronauts achieved this feet without being able to see what they were doing. There film stock was unaffected by the intense peaks and powerful cosmic radiation on the Moon, conditions that should have made it useless. They managed to adjust their cameras, change film and swap filters in pressurized suits. It should have been almost impossible with the gloves on their fingers.

Award winning British photographer David Persey is convinced the pictures are fake. His astonishing findings are explained alongside the pictures on these pages, but the basic points are as follows: The shadows could only have been created with multiple light sources and,in particular, powerful spotlights. But the only light source on the Moon was the sun.

The American flag and the words "United States" are always Brightly lit, even when everything around is in shadow. Not one still picture matches the film footage, yet NASA claims both were shot at the same time.

The pictures are so perfect, each one would have taken a slick advertising agency hours to put them together. But the astronauts managed it repeatedly. David Persey believes the mistakes were deliberate, left there by "whistle blowers" who were keen for the truth to one day get out.

If Persey is right and the pictures are fake, then we've only NASA's word that man ever went to the Moon. And, asks Rene, "Why would anyone fake pictures of an event that actually happened?"

The questions don't stop there. Outer space is awash with deadly radiation that emanates from solar flares firing out from the sun. Standard astronauts orbiting earth in near space, like those who recently fixed the Hubble telescope, are protected by the earth's Van Allen belt. But the Moon is to 240,000 miles distant, way outside this safe band. And, during the Apollo flights, astronomical data shows there were no less than 1,485 such flares.

John Mauldin, a physicist who works for NASA, once said shielding at least two meters thick would be needed. Yet the walls of the Lunar Landers which took astronauts from the spaceship to the moons surface were, said NASA, about the thickness of heavy duty aluminum foil.

How could that stop this deadly radiation? And if the astronauts were protected by their space suits, why didn't rescue workers use such protective gear at the Chernobyl meltdown, which released only a fraction of the dose astronauts would encounter? Not one Apollo astronaut ever contracted cancer - not even the Apollo 16 crew who were on their way to the Moon when a big flare started. "They should have been fried", says Rene.

Furthermore, every Apollo mission before number 11 (the first to the Moon) was plagued with around 20,000 defects a-piece. Yet, with the exception of Apollo 13, NASA claims there wasn't one major technical problem on any of their Moon missions. Just one effect could have blown the whole thing. "The odds against these are so unlikely that God must have been the co-pilot," says Rene.

Several years after NASA claimed its first Moonlanding, Buzz Aldrin "the second man on the Moon" was asked at a banquet what it felt like to step on to the lunar surface. Aldrin staggered to his feet and left the room crying uncontrollably. It would not be the last time he did this. "It strikes me he's suffering from trying to live out a very big lie," says Rene. Aldrin may also fear for his life.

Virgil Grissom, a NASA astronaut who baited the Apollo program, was due to pilot Apollo 1 as part of the landings build up. In January 1967, he hung a lemon on his Apollo capsule (in the US, unroadworthy cars are called lemons) and told his wife Betty: "If there is ever a serious accident in the space program, it's likely to be me."

Nobody knows what fuelled his fears, but by the end of the month he and his two co-pilots were dead, burnt to death during a test run when their capsule, pumped full of high pressure pure oxygen, exploded.

Scientists couldn't believe NASA's carelessness - even a chemistry students in high school know high pressure oxygen is extremely explosive. In fact, before the first manned Apollo fight even cleared the launch pad, a total of 11 would be astronauts were dead. Apart from the three who were incinerated, seven died in plane crashes and one in a car smash. Now this is
a spectacular accident rate.

"One wonders if these 'accidents' weren't NASA's way of correcting mistakes," says Rene. "Of saying that some of these men didn't have the sort of 'right stuff' they were looking."

NASA wont respond to any of these claims, their press office will only say that the Moon landings happened and the pictures are real. But a NASA public affairs officer called Julian Scheer once delighted 200 guests at a private party with footage of astronauts apparently on a landscape. It had been made on a mission film set and was identical to what NASA claimed was they real lunar landscape. "The purpose of this film," Scheer told the enthralled group, "is to indicate that you really can fake things on the ground, almost to the point of deception." He then invited his audience to "Come to your own decision about whether or not man actually did walk on the Moon."

A sudden attack of honesty? You bet, says Rene, who claims the only real thing about the Apollo missions were the lift offs. "The astronauts simply have to be on board," he says, "in case the rocket exploded. It was the easiest way to ensure NASA wasn't left with three astronauts who ought to be dead." he claims, adding that they came down a day or so later, out of the
public eye (global surveillance wasn't what it is now) and into the safe hands of NASA officials, who whisked them off to prepare for the big day a week later.

And now NASA is planning another giant step - Project Outreach, a 1 trillion dollar manned mission to Mars. "Think what they'll be able to mock up with today's computer graphics," says Rene Chillingly. "Special effects was in its infancy in the 60s. This time round will have no way of determining the truth."

9 SPACE ODDITIES:

1. Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.

2. A camera panned upwards to catch Apollo 16's Lunar Landerlifting off the Moon. Who did the filming?

3. One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?

4. The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.

5. The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.

6. Text from pictures in the article said that only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?

7. The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering if there is no air or wind on the moon?

8. How can the flag be brightly lit when its side is to the light? And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?

9. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust. The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it's never been fired.

It is called media power. Whatever the mass media will show and repeat a million times, people will believe it, even if it does not make sense. The questions that were asked regarding moonlanding are valid questions, that point to only one answer: Moonlanding was faked.

__________________
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Originally Posted by BD-Shardul
Fotunately, points against men's landing on moon was not raised by a muslim.

Good point

__________________
Life in Duniya has a beginning, hence has an end. Although life of Akherat has a beginning, it does not have an end! Shouldn't I pick something everlasting over temporary? www.askimam.org

I think this has been discussed to its limits elsewhere, and not on BC.

I've read about it a lot of times, and all I can say is, there really isn't anything impossible. But then again, media can have its power in turning something into the ultimate "truth". We see that in the islamophobic materials that are distributed everyday.

__________________
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Fans need to stop DUI (Dreaming Under Influence)!

Originally Posted by Dawah
It is called media power. Whatever the mass media will show and repeat a million times, people will believe it, even if it does not make sense. The questions that were asked regarding moonlanding are valid questions, that point to only one answer: Moonlanding was faked.

There are many moon rocks on display in museums, brought back to Earth, and has been researched by many scientists. Are you prepared to say that all of them were part of a conspiracy, or worse yet, liars?

Actually, that is not the problem you have. You will be the first one to open a thread, if say hypothetically, an "Islamic" nation, that conforms with your definition of an Islamic state, manages to land a mission on the moon. It will be great then. Wouldn't it? The way I see it, people like you ( not being personal here ) who continue to see things with religious tint in every matter is the crux of the problem facing Islamic nations today. What we need is a revival of the glorious age that Islam had eight hundred years ago, when it lead the world in science, innovation, philosophy etc.This long period of intellectual dormancy is serving none of us any good. You make yourself look silly and irrelevant when you claim falsehoods to be true based on your prejudice. Just as the West profited from early Islamic innovation, we should be open to learn a few things or two from them ( they have a lot to offer if you want to learn). Unless you think science is unimportant, then, the whole point is mute. How long will we live in denial? Wake up.

I used to think that Americans were some of the most gullible people on earth, but it looks like the current generation of my countrymen could give them a run for their money. I realize that the Internet is a wonderful toy for many of you, but that is no reason to believe everything you read there as received wisdom or the gospel truth. Evolution and your Creator has endowed you with a brain. Why not use it? Why not spend a few minutes thinking about the claims that these conspiracy theories make and decide if those claims would actually hold water? Don't we teach students to think critically in our schools anymore? Or is this an artifact of the internet age -- putting the brain on hold, and simply parroting anything one sees on the internet? You could, perish the thought, even actually use the internet for doing some research on these claims, instead of just blindly posting them here. It took me only a few minutes to debunk these claims. What's your excuse?

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1. Apollo 14 astronaut Allen Shepard played golf on the Moon. In front of a worldwide TV audience, Mission Control teased him about slicing the ball to the right. Yet a slice is caused by uneven air flow over the ball. The Moon has no atmosphere and no air.

3. One NASA picture from Apollo 11 is looking up at Neil Armstrong about to take his giant step for mankind. The photographer must have been lying on the planet surface. If Armstrong was the first man on the Moon, then who took the shot?

If he was talking about this picture, that's not Neil Armstrong, that's a picture of Aldrin coming out of the Lunar Module taken by Armstrong. All the pictures on this lunar mission are archived here. If your conspiracy theorist got such simple facts wrong, then it doesn't speak much for his credibility, I'm afraid.

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4. The pressure inside a space suit was greater than inside a football. The astronauts should have been puffed out like the Michelin Man, but were seen freely bending their joints.

See this wikipedia explanation, and the Apollo space suit specs here and here. We use pressure suits for pilots in high-altitude planes; do you think that we wouldn't be able to make functional ones for astronauts?

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5. The Moon landings took place during the Cold War. Why didn't America make a signal on the moon that could be seen from earth? The PR would have been phenomenal and it could have been easily done with magnesium flares.

Because you wouldn't be able to see any magnesium flares from earth, if you take into account the distance and resolving power of the telescopes involved. You might conceivably have been able to see say, a 10 or 20-kiloton explosion, but that might have been a tad risky for the astronauts. And you might be too young or not have talked with people who were alive during 1969, but even in what was then East Pakistan, people were riveted to the radio or TV (the PR effect was that huge). Also, given that it was the Cold War, that there was considerable penetration of US intelligence by Soviet spies, and that the Russians were no slouch themselves at getting into space, don't you think if there was a single shred of doubt about the moon landings, the Russians would have had a field day in terms of just the propaganda value.

You might, however, want to look up the Lunar Laser Ranging Experiments involving retroreflector arrays installed by the crews of Apollo 11, 14, and 15. Basically, lasers on Earth are aimed at these retroreflectors and the time delay for the reflected light to return is used to determine the distance to the moon. The distance has been measured repeatedly over a period of more than 35 years.

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6. Text from pictures in the article said that only two men walked on the Moon during the Apollo 12 mission. Yet the astronaut reflected in the visor has no camera. Who took the shot?

Is this the picture he is talking about? Because both astronauts have Hasselbach cameras mounted on chest brackets. See the magnified image here for the reflection on the visor in greater detail. Let's be clear about this. Here's the archive for all of the Apollo 12 mission pictures, if there was another picture the writer had in mind. Let's be blunt here. This strikes me as a perfect example of an ignorant idiot who has his mind already made up that the moonlanding was a hoax, and is trying to come up with anything to prove his claim. He can't see a camera in a low-resolution reflection, well then, obviously there was no camera. This is how a crank operates, not a serious scientist or a scholar.

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7. The flags shadow goes behind the rock so doesn't match the dark line in the foreground, which looks like a line cord. So the shadow to the lower right of the spaceman must be the flag. Where is his shadow? And why is the flag fluttering if there is no air or wind on the moon?

"Shadows on the Moon are complicated because there are several light sources: the Sun, the Earth, and the Moon itself. Light from these sources is scattered by lunar dust in many different directions, including into shadows. Additionally, the Moon's surface is not flat and shadows falling into craters and hills appear longer, shorter and distorted from the simple expectations of the hoax believers. More significantly, perspective effects come into play, particularly on rough or angled ground. This leads to non-parallel shadows even on objects which are extremely close to each other, and can be observed easily on Earth wherever fences or trees are found. And finally, the camera in use was fitted with a wide angle lens, which naturally resulted in subtle versions of "fish eye" distortion" (Plait, P., Bad Astronomy: Misconceptions and Misuses Revealed, from Astrology to the MoonLanding "Hoax" 2002:167-72).

That, I think, explains the shadows. Now, let's move on to the flag.

...The astronauts were moving the flag into position, causing motion. Since there is no air on the Moon to provide friction, these movements caused a long-lasting undulating movement seen in the flag. There was a rod extending from the top of the flagpole to hold the flag out for proper display (visible under the fabric in many photographs). The fabric's rippled appearance was due to its having been folded during flight and gave it an appearance which could be mistaken for motion in a still photograph. The top supporting rod of the flag was telescopic and the crew of Apollo 11 found they could not fully extend it. Later crews did not fully extend this rod because they liked how it made the flag appear. A viewing of the videotape made during the Moonwalk shows that shortly after the astronauts remove their hands from the flag/flagpole, it stops moving and remains motionless. At one point the flag is in view for well over thirty minutes and it remains completely motionless throughout that period (and all similar periods). (from Wikipedia).

Cropped photo of Buzz Aldrin saluting the flag (Note the fingers of Aldrin's right hand can be seen behind his helmet).

Cropped photo taken a few seconds later, Buzz Aldrin's hand is down, head turned toward the camera, the flag is unchanged.

See also this video below of the flag being planted by the crew of Apollo 15.

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8. How can the flag be brightly lit when its side is to the light? And where, in all of these shots, are the stars?

See previous comment about different sources of light being available regarding shadows. And then tell us, which picture?

Let's move on to the so-called absence of stars. Citing from the appropriate Wikipedia entry which also has the relevant photographs:

Stars are also never seen in Space Shuttle, Mir, International Space Station Earth observation photos, or even sporting events that take place at night. The sun in the Earth/Moon area shines as brightly as on a clear noon day on Earth, so cameras used for imaging these things are set for daylight exposure, with quick shutter speeds in order to prevent overexposing the film. The dim light of the stars simply does not have a chance to expose the film. (This effect can be demonstrated on Earth by attempting to view stars from a brightly lit parking lot. You can only see them if you somehow block out all illuminated objects from your field of view, and then let your eyes adjust for night vision. Otherwise, it is like taking a picture of the night sky with exposure settings for a bright sunny day. Science fiction movies and television shows do confuse this issue by depicting stars as visible in space under all lighting conditions.) Stars were seen by every Apollo mission crew except for the unfortunate Apollo 13 (they couldn't see the stars due to the fact that oxygen and water vapor created a haze around the spacecraft). Stars were used for navigation purposes and were occasionally also seen through cabin windows when the conditions allowed. To see stars, nothing lit by sunlight could be in the viewer's field of view. (Plait 2002:158-60).

Stars are not dramatically brighter in space (above the Earth's atmosphere). Professional astronomer and two-time space shuttle astronaut Ronald A. Parise stated that he could barely see stars at all from space. He had to turn out all of the lights in the shuttle to even glimpse the stars (Plait 2002:160). Even with cameras several times more sensitive than the ones used on Apollo, it takes an exposure of several seconds for even the brighter stars to show up. Exposure times of the Apollo photographs were a small fraction of a second, typically 1/250 of a second.

Payload restrictions made the transport of telescope facilities to the Moon unfeasible, and without these ordinary stellar photography would have served no (scientific) purpose. However, even without such facilities, the Moon does offer several advantages as an observation platform. The near-absence of an atmosphere means that stellar imaging is possible at many wavelengths which are not visible from Earth. Long-exposure photos were taken with a special far-ultraviolet camera by Apollo 16 astronauts on April 21, 1972 from the surface of the Moon. (This photo has some stars labeled.) Some of these photos show the Earth with stars from the Capricornus and Aquarius constellations in the background. The joint Belgium/UK./Holland satellite TD-1 later scanned the sky for stars that are bright in UV light. The TD-1 data obtained with the shortest passband is a close match for the Apollo 16 photographs.

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9. The Lander weighed 17 tons yet the astronauts feet seem to have made a bigger dent in the dust. The powerful booster rocket at the base of the Lunar Lander was fired to slow descent to the moons service. Yet it has left no traces of blasting on the dust underneath. It should have created a small crater, yet the booster looks like it's never been fired.

The lander weighed less than three tons on the Moon. The astronauts were much lighter than the lander, but the area of their boots was also much smaller than that of the lander's pads. Pressure, or force per unit area, rather than force, determines the depth of compression of the soil. An example would be driving a car (heavy) on sand, then getting a person (light) to walk on the same surface. You will often find the depth of tracks to be about the same (again, from Wikipedia).

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I shall be blunt. BD-Shardul's protestations to the contrary, and crybaby-ish demands for Beamer to be banned, comments such as

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Fotunately, points against men's landing on moon was not raised by a muslim.

made by him, incline me to agree with Beamer's perspective. I suspect this entire original post, and its support by Dawah, was to somehow elevate Allah's "keramoti" by denigrating human achievements. Frankly, I think the Creator can stand on His own and does not need you to come to His defence. The only thing you achieve instead is making your own faith look like a backward religion.

I believe the "first" moon-landing might well have been fake but the sub-sequent ones were not. There were political reasons behind it, of course. A few years back, there was a four hour long panel discussion about this on Chanel Four, UK. It had raised many valid question about the initial landing.

Originally Posted by BanCricFan
I believe the "first" moon-landing might well have been fake but the sub-sequent ones were not. There were political reasons behind it, of course. A few years back, there was a four hour long panel discussion about this on Chanel Four, UK. It had raised many valid question about the initial landing.

Why dont you get a copy of that discussion...I'm sure it must be somewhere in this cyberspace!

"Valid" as it deemed to my reason back then. I'm no astro-physicist and certainly not endowed with a photographic memory. But those scientists (some of them are quite respected in their fields) doubting the "landing" were quite convincing for this layman.

A parsec is the distance from which the Earth's distance from the Sun would subtend one second of arc. Symbol pc. [Early 20th century. ...
encarta.msn.com/dictionary_1861723921/parsec.html - 54k - Cached - Similar pages

BTW, this post is very offensive and is a personall attack. I demand a one week ban on Beamer for such attacking post. The rest depends on the mods.

To Beamer, you have shown your skin. This conspiracy was developed by a christian, not a muslim. So, why you are expressing your anger towards Dawah bhai? No one is forcing you to believe or swallow anything. Why attack other's personal views then?

Of all the fottages of apolo 11 requested from NASA over a 5 year period,
one gem was discovered just before the completion of this documentary.
An old rill was received by mistake...watch it here The documentary is called "Funny thing happened on the way to the Moon"

Originally Posted by damalChele
I feel obligated to post these links. Watch this 43 min long documentary broadcasted by Fox with an open mind. It sure will leave you with scratching your head.

No it won't, if you have an open and a critical mind. I have already addressed many of the so-called "points" it raises in my initial response to BD-Shardul's post. If you want a point by point refutation, do look at Phil Plait's elegant critique on his Bad Astronomy web site.

And keep in mind, that this was made by Fox, a company which is more interested in sensationalism (and thus ratings) than truth, the very same company that also made the "documentary" Alien Autopsy, which Fox later admitted was fake, which runs news reports which it calls "balanced and fair," but are patently not (if you are going to watch a documentary on Google, I recommend OUTFOXED: Rupert Murdoch's War on Journalism instead).

Seriously, as I posted in my previous "jhari", be critical, and think for youself. Don't necessarily accept everything you see on TV or read as the gospel truth. Learn what Occam's razor is, if you don't already, and apply it to the two competing hypotheses: (i) that we landed men on the moon, or (ii) a massive conspiracy involving thousands of people in the know was carried out successfully to fake the landings.